[From Time Stood Still by Paul Cohen-Portheim]

PREFACE

THERE is a saying, attributed to Lord Beaconsfield, which contains a very profound truth : 'Most crimes in this world are committed through lack of imagination. If the murderer's imagination were vivid enough to make him picture the sensations of his victim there would be no murder.' The Great War was absolutely beyond human imagination, that is why it could continue for years and why there is a danger of new wars. People are genuinely shocked or grieved when one aeroplane smashes or when there is a pit disaster and a few human lives are destroyed, but when thousands of aeroplanes are shot down and hundreds of thousands of men blown up by mines the scale of horrors transcends imagination and people cease to care. That dulling infliuence of war on human sympathy is, I consider, its worst and most tragic effect. That is also why, in my opinion, there can never be enough books, plays, films, accounts of the war, never enough means of impressing imagination. That catastrophe was so gigantic and so complex that it can only be reconstructed by a vast number of single accounts of individual and limited experiences, and we are only at the beginning of such a reconstruction. Nor should these accounts be limited to those by people who took an active part in the fighting ; one should know how all those countless millions we call the people lived - in France or Germany, England or Russia. The parents and the children, the old people whose declining years were saddened, the very young whose whole future was changed. Nothing is too small or ordinary, for all connects up, is part of the great fresco.

There is only one condition and that is strict truthfulness. When war broke out, leading men of all neutral nations were asked by the Paris newspaper, Le Figaro, to express their sentiments. Very few of the answers were in any way remarkable, but the great Danish critic and essayist, Georg Brandes, wrote : 'The real tragedy of this war is that it has assassinated truth.' These were prophetic words. Truth was dead and propaganda had replaced it ; that is why the task of this after-war period is to re-discover truth, not to replace pro-war propaganda by anti-war propaganda. This book tells of the experiences of a German civilian interned in England, and it is the author's aim to describe nothing except what he actually saw and experienced. It would be easy to write a lurid and sensational narrative if one were to transgress these limits and write of all one was told as facts, of all the horrors spread by rumour. That would most certainly heighten the narrative's dramatic effect, only it would, I consider, entirely destroy its value. Compared to life at the front, life in a concentration camp was undramatic ; there was no danger, there was no heroism, voluntary or forced. It was monotonous, it was drab, it was futile, and in that very futility lay its tragedy. That existence was not dramatic Iike a drame de cape et d'epee, it had no trace of the romantic about it, it was a drama of the mind, like some of the Russian plays such as Chekov's, and its atmosphere was that of Dostoievski's House of the Dead. Imprisonment is considered a severe
punishment for criminals. Yet in this war hundreds of thousands of men were imprisoned in all civilized countries for no other crime than their. nation­ality. I cannot see that any one country is more to blame than any other, nor how ane could bear any grudge against that particular country or people which applied to one a treatment which the conscience of all peoples bore with the greatest equanimity. One has to be on guard against the danger of forgetting that what happened to oneself was but one of the very minor aspects of the tragedy of the war. It was quite a sideshow, I know, but r know that sideshow ; it was one of many symptoms of universal hysteria, but a symptom as characteristic as any other, and the one I happen to have studied. As Corot the landscape-painter said of his art 'Mon verre est petit, mais je bois Bans mon verre-.' There is yet another danger I had to guard against in writing this book, that of seeing the time of my internment in too rosy a light when looking back on it. One thing, I find that I have a better memory for pleasant things than for the unpleasant; furthermore, the period following my release was in many ways worse than that of my intern­ment and made me feel sometimes I should have preferred it to continue. But the main reason is that while I condemn the system and think it has done untold harm, I cannot honestly say that it has harmed me. It was terrible sometimes, it held dismal weeks and months, but in its final effect I am inclined to bless.it, not to curse it. That is, however, because mine is an exceptional case. In an epidemic which kills or disables most, there rraay he one or the other who, having recovered from the disease, feels better than he did before. That, I think, is my case, or at any rate my way of looking at it, but this must not prevent me from considering the disease a disease nor induce my readers to think that I call good what in itself is evil.

Any comments, errors or omissions gratefully received The Editor HTML© F Coakley , 2021